In large data centers and other computer installations, computers are often initially deployed in a “bare metal” state in which an operating system is not installed on the computer. It is desirable to automate the configuration of a bare metal computer to minimize manual configuration steps required by a data center technician. Often a bare metal computer will be configured to obtain in interne protocol (IP) address from a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server, and initially boot by loading an operating system from a preboot execution environment (PXE) server. Thereafter, the operating system loaded from the PXE server performs additional configuration steps, such as formatting the local hard drive and installing a local copy of an operating system. However, additional manual configuration steps often remain.